


Small Victories

by duckmoles



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Humor, M/M, Pre-Canon, true love is covering up a murder together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-12 19:48:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22856809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckmoles/pseuds/duckmoles
Summary: The day Gertrude Robinson dies, Peter is having a marvelous time drinking champagne on a yacht.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas
Comments: 31
Kudos: 158





	Small Victories

The day Gertrude Robinson dies, Peter is having a marvelous time drinking champagne on a yacht. He's not sure where exactly he is, but if he had to take a wild guess, he'd put his money on the Mediterranean. It's just about the right season for it. There's someone - probably an investor or something equally as menial and exhausting, talking very enthusiastically to him. His hands wave dangerously close to Peter's face. 

Peter pulls out his buzzing phone while the man is still talking, and takes pleasure in the delicious way his voice trails off at the realization that Peter hasn't been listening to his speech for the last half hour or so. Peter squints at the caller ID, which is an entirely futile exercise - Peter never saves anyone's contact information and subsequently assumes that all calls he gets are spam calls. He smiles politely at the man anyway and holds up a finger, getting to his feet. 

"I have to take a call," Peter mouths, even though he hasn't actually answered the phone and thus has no real reason to mouth anything. "Important business, you understand." 

He walks away, not bothering to spare a glance backwards, and when he reaches a more secluded area of the ship, very carefully rejects the call. 

Peter's about to pull out a cigar when he feels what probably would feel like a sharp shove if not for the fact that it took place entirely inside his own head. He takes a moment to groan. Who else would be calling him, if not his perpetual headache. 

When his phone buzzes this time, he takes great pleasure in rejecting it again. 

The third time, Peter laboriously lets his fingers brush the green acceptance button. 

"Who is it," he says, despite the fact that he knows who it is as clear as if it had been dropped into his head by not-so-divine providence.

"You were right," Elias says primly from the other end, not bothering to attempt to humor the question. It's only decades of knowing the man that Peter can sense the annoyance in his voice.

"Well," Peter says, "you'll have to elaborate." 

There's a tinny _tsk _from the other end. "Peter." 

Peter resists the urge to hold his hands up defensively; he would end up dropping his phone in the ocean, which, if this were anyone else, would probably be the best way to end this conversation. 

"We're not all mind readers, Elias," Peter points out, and Elias sighs, as if merely the act of talking to Peter were some great burden that he, magnanimous head of the Magnus Institute that he was, took up as an act of charity. 

"Gertrude," Elias begins, and Peter instinctively finds the fog gathering around him at the name, "tried to kill me today." 

Oh. Peter fights back the instinct to say something that would probably have Elias hang up on him before he got all the details, like, "Join the club." 

When Elias continues, it's through gritted teeth and crumpled composure that Peter wasn't even aware that Elias was capable of. “She tried to burn down my Institute." 

Well, Peter thinks dully, _it's more like _our _Institute, given how much money I’ve poured into the thing_. The thought is pushed away in an instant with the horrifying, liberating realization that Gertrude Robinson - _The _Archivist, _Gertrude Robinson_, whose main strategy for solving problems is explosives and a stare that could and has killed many men - is dead. 

"Are you sure?" Peter blurts out. 

"Of course I'm sure," Elias hisses. "There's still gasoline all over my floors." 

"No, no," Peter replies. "Are you sure she's dead?"

There's a long pause, and then the sound of a gunshot. 

"Yes," Elias says. 

Elias inhales deeply, as if to gather himself. Peter quite agrees - he's not quite sure what to feel himself. On one hand, _Gertrude Robinson_ is actually _dead _and dear god, Peter has to tell Nathaniel so they can do something drastic, like spend a lot of money very extravagantly. On the other hand, Gertrude Robinson being dead has some horrifying implications on the delicate balance that all of them teeter on, Elias included. Peter isn't even sure if he's willing to put a bet that the Institute will last another decade. 

"Get over here," Elias says, brisk and stiff and not like he just shot a person at all, and then he hangs up. 

Peter doesn't even make an excuse for leaving - he just feels the blissful fog of the Lonely envelop him, and he heads for London. 

A private jet and a few hours later, Peter arrives at the institute. It's late, and most everyone has already left the building. Just the way Peter usually likes it. There's a distinct pressure in his head, an uncharacteristically heavy sign of Elias's presence. Gertrude's death must be getting to him more than Peter thought. 

"Well," Peter says as he emerges into Elias's office, "What did you do with the body?" 

Elias grimaces, the expression unfamiliar on his normally passive face. He's stripped down to nothing but his shirt and vest, his necktie pulled out from its careful tuck. If this were any other occasion, Peter would have shoved him up against his desk the minute he walked in. 

"I was busy scrubbing the security cameras," Elias says carefully. 

Peter grins, despite himself. "Left me to do all your dirty work, did you?"

Elias has his elbows on his desk, fingers tented together. He looks up at Peter through half lidded eyes, and Peter twitches; he really wants to shove Elias onto that desk. 

As soon as Peter has the thought, Elias stands abruptly, the chair moving backwards with a loud scrape. "She's downstairs," he says. “No time to waste.”

“Get out of my head,” Peter says half-heartedly, not really meaning it, following him.

For all his visits, Peter has never actually been down to the archives before. It's dingier than expected. colder and mustier, though part of that must be attributed to the open trapdoor into the old tunnels, where Peter can faintly smell the scent of rotting flesh. He wrinkles his nose. This is why he doesn't like to deal with people. So much...meatiness. Peter huffs out a bit of laughter as his thoughts drift to that Hopworth fellow, and does it again when Elias makes a noise of disapproval.

He follows Elias down until the air grows thick and weighty, the oppressive state of Smirke’s tunnels fully bearing down on them. It was only fitting that Gertrude Robinson would die here, in a place so devoid of any of their patrons’ power. Simon would call it thematically appropriate, the pretentious bastard. 

“Oh,” Peter says when they arrive at Gertrude's body. She’s surrounded by a can of gasoline and C4, a copious amount of blood pooled under her form. There’s a gun, also covered in blood, discarded near the wall. Next to him, Elias's nose wrinkles delicately. 

“Well,” Elias says, “you see why I called you here.” 

Peter pokes at Gertrude with a shoe. “Not really. Couldn’t you have cleaned this up yourself? Or is the great Elias Bouchard scared of a little blood?”

For someone so prone to bouts of savage violence, Elias is fastidious to the point of complete and utter annoyance. Must be his Victorian sensibilities, Peter muses. Elias grew up back in the day when a paper-cut could kill a man. 

“Really, Peter. It’s not my first dead body.” One of the truest things that Elias has ever said. He levies a look at Peter when Peter nudges Gertrude again. Peter tells himself that he’s not doing it to check that she’s dead. She certainly doesn’t look it. Even in death she still manages to pull off terrifying. He wouldn’t have put it past her to make a deal with Terminus to become immortal in exchange for not blowing up death itself. 

Elias steps around to the opposite side of Gertrude so that he’s facing Peter. “Help me lift her,” he commands, and hooks his arms under hers. Peter follows suit with her legs, though rigor mortis had already begun to sink in hours ago. Together, they carry Gertrude down the halls, twisting and turning through the tunnels smirke had designed so many years ago, into a small room with its door ajar. 

Peter’s eyes have adjusted to the point where he can make out the piles and piles of cardboard boxes scattered around the room. He whistles lowly. “Seems like she had quite a little nestegg going on here,” he comments as they drop Gertrude into a wooden chair in the center of the room. He wipes the blood off of his right hand absentmindedly onto his trouser leg and wanders over to one of the boxes. 

“You didn't notice all these tapes disappearing?”

Elias is staring ominously at Gertrude's body, though Peter supposes that in Elias's case, any kind of staring becomes ominous. “I noticed,” he says. “Though I wasn’t exactly sure where they disappeared to. To think that all this time she had been stockpiling them in the tunnels…”

Peter can’t help the smile that spreads across his face as he drops a tape back into its box. “Gertrude Robinson, huh,” he says. “End of an era.”

Elias’s own face is impassive, though there’s a faint twitch at the edge of his lips that might as well be him bursting into laughter. “Don’t be so absurd,” he says. “Gertrude was another Archivist, like all the rest before her.”

“Yes, and the other Archivists _all _managed to pull off something this big while under your watchful eye.”

“Don’t get uppity with me, Peter,” Elias says. He’s one to talk. 

“You like it,” Peter shoots back. Elias sighs, the way Elias always sighs, exasperated and always like he has something much better to do than be here with you. 

“Help me with the blood,” Elias says, in lieu of a reply. 

Together, with the power of ingenuity, experience, and a frankly alarming number of trips back and forth with a small bucket that Elias got from who knows where, they manage to move about a gallon of blood to Gertrude’s desk. Elias wears his genial, serial-killer smile as they smear red onto Gertrude’s paperwork, all her cryptic spreadsheets and half-scribbled notes to herself that Peter is pretty sure she only wrote just to spite Elias with how much he couldn’t understand it. 

Elias somehow manages to come out the other end with only a smudge of blood on his chin. on him, it only manages to make him more striking, red on white on blue, blue, eyes. Peter wants to lick it off.

In contrast, Peter probably looks like a days old corpse, which, he realizes, is definitely not the first time he’s been described that way. This is exactly why he usually leaves all this gory violence to the slaughter or the hunt’s lot. Not in his breeding, you see.

When Elias hands Peter the gun, Peter gives him a look that he hopes conveys as much _I’m not sure what you want me to do with this and why aren’t you disposing of this yourself_ as he actually feels. Elias, the bastard, busies himself with making sure the trap door to the tunnels is well hidden. Peter debates the merits of just tossing the gun in the rubbish before chucking it somewhere in the lonely, where he can only hope some poor banished bastard will find it instead. 

Elias is bent over shoving the carpet back into place. Peter licks his lips, and he deliberately walks up against him, slotting himself neatly behind his back.

Elias stiffens and stands upright. “Not now, Peter.”

Peter’s hands find themselves around Elias’s waist. “Come on, Mr. Bouchard. are you telling me you weren’t planning on leaving this until tomorrow for you to walk in here, startle in surprise from seeing your Archivist missing, and call the coppers? We should celebrate, if nothing else.”

“Your hands are covered in blood,” Elias points out. 

Touché. “It's mostly dried by now,” Peter says. His dick twitches, which Elias can surely feel from where it’s pressed against his lower back. 

Elias pushes Peter off with one hard shove and turns around. “Not,” he says, “while you’ve practically bathed in the remains of my former Archivist. With your pedigree, you would think you would have been raised with some _manners_.” 

“I wasn't raised much!” Peter cheerfully says, which is true, but he backs off nonetheless. he drags his hands down his trousers again, which doesn’t do much except ruin it further. Elias probably has a dry cleaning service he can recommend. Speaking of which - Peter strips out of his coat (unsalvageable at this point) and sighs dramatically. “If only,” he declares, “I had a loving husband with a place conveniently nearby where I could refresh myself and celebrate the death of the woman who had me waste millions of dollars.” 

“If only,” Elias says, and Peter suddenly remembers that _right_, he doesn’t actually have that as of six months ago. Elias moves for the jacket he had thrown over the back of a chair anyway. 

Simon fairchild had once described “dear old Jonah” as the most violent man in a library, and watching as Elias carefully puts himself back together - not that there’s much dishelvement in the first place. He smooths his hair back, asks to borrow Peter's eyes to dab at his chin with an embroidered handkerchief, and by the time they leave the building, it’s easy to believe that nothing is amiss, that Elias is just a mere businessman coming home late after a long day of work. Peter shrouds himself in the protection of the Lonely as they walk, the few passersby’s vision skating over him and Elias both, albeit for altogether different reasons. 

Because he’s Elias Bouchard, his penthouse flat has wide open windows and a balcony to survey his institute and all within his purview, or something. Peter hadn’t been really listening to his explanation when he’d first brought Peter here. If anything, it makes peeling off his gore-stained sweater and trousers, dropping them unrepentantly on the floor, feel vaguely scandalous and voyeuristic, which he supposes is entirely the point. 

Peter grins when he catches Elias looking. “Join me?” he says, as lecherous as he can make it. He even throws in an eyebrow waggle for good measure. 

Elias makes a face. Peter loves his faces, loves the way they screw his delicate, carefully implacable features into something warped and twisted. Suits the man well. “Not while you’re like this,” Elias says. He tosses a towel at Peter. “Shower.” 

The steam that rises up from Elias’s luxurious wet room - Peter keeps sneaking looks at the full bath, trying not to remember the feeling of Elias’s toes in his face the last time they shoved in there - isn’t quite the fog of his patron, but it’s close enough. 

When Peter comes out, toweling his hair dry, he finds Elias, freshly changed into his silken pajamas that Peter had gotten him the one time he sailed back from Hong Kong (he was mostly sure they were real silk), with a bottle of champagne on the small circular table in front of him. He sits by the windows, staring in the direction of the institute. 

Peter helps himself to a swig of champagne, not bothering with a glass, and throws himself onto the chair across from Elias. “End of an era!” he repeats, more peppy than he’d really expected. Ah, well, he was entitled to some bit of glee. “_Finally, _am I right?” When Elias doesn’t respond, Peter kicks at his calf with his bare foot. 

“Don’t tell me you’re getting sentimental,” Peter says. “You were the one who was so scared of her you didn’t even do your -” Peter waves his fingers around in the vague direction of his head. 

“I’m not,” Elias says, sharp. He turns his gaze from the window onto Peter. “She has been a thorn in my side for the past four decades, and frankly, good riddance.” 

Peter polishes off the champagne. “You were just annoyed because you couldn’t control her.”

“I wouldn’t fall victim to such...petty feuds,” Elias says, which Peter knows is a flat out lie, because Elias had been the person to spitefully buy out a significant portion of Corruption-related Leitners for the Institute after Amherst’s entire debacle with the super bacteria. “Perhaps we should toast to her.”

Peter gets another bottle of champagne and pours them each a glass. “To failed rituals,” Peter says, raising his glass. 

“To ruined plans,” Elias says. 

“To Gertrude Robinson,” Peter says with rather more bitterness than he meant. 

Elias has that glint in his eye, the one he only has when he’s planning something. It might be Peter’s favorite look of his. “To the future,” Elias declares. Well. Whatever plans he has up his sleeve, and he always does, Peter wants in, for or against. 

Peter can’t help the grin that slides its way onto his face. Like a disease, like Elias’s foot slowly creeping up his leg, like fading into the welcoming embrace of his patron. “To the future.” 

**Author's Note:**

> peter is so inappropriately horny lmao


End file.
